“... Western attitudes, are fairly hysterical. The professional shark-hater and shark-killer Captain William E. Young remarked in his 1934 memoir Shark! Shark! that the very word summons up a powerful mental image of a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might ...”

“... Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all the way through the block. (The fitting into the city is graceful, and throughout the museum Taniguchi provides unexpected glimpses of nearby buildings.) You then turn to mount a grand stairway where you are greeted, on the first ...”

“... sign.The sign said: ‘Coloured not admitted.’ ‘My playmates,’ Hughes continued, ‘who were white and lived next door to me, could go to that motion picture and I could not. I could never see a film in Lawrence again.’ In elementary school his teacher made ‘unpleasant and derogatory remarks about Negroes’ and he was stoned by classmates on his way ...”

“... which was to serve as a talisman for so many French soldiers in Flanders. The anthropologist William Christian discovered the discarded negatives of a man who had worked at the Basque shrine of Ezquioga in the Thirties. Comparing them to the photographs which were chosen as official souvenirs, he found that the images only passed where the ...”

“... of public expectation, and how to meet it, that bedevilled Nancy Reagan during her time in the White House. ‘By the end of 1981,’ she tells us, ‘I had a higher disapproval rating than any first lady of modern times.’ Joan Didion called her smile ‘a study in frozen insincerity’. Gloria Steinem called her ‘the marzipan wife’. The Chicago ...”

“... of show-business, it is unlikely that any overweight person will ever again be elected to the White House. A necessary (if not sufficient) condition for electoral success nowadays is that one should ‘come over well’ on television. And fat people, by and large and on the average, do not. Mr Cockerell’s absorbing book might, at first, be seen as a ...”

“... a blind man who is also a midget and pulls a little cart. He was looking very closely at his white stick. Though I have found it very hard to convince Carmen Callil – who believes that, since she occasionally sees me out in the evening, I am out in the evening all day – I am actually on my own all day every day. And since I am single, this would mean ...”

“... was an explosion of hot air and hot water. For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky, insubstantial yet overwhelmingly powerful. Ten thousand trumpets and twenty thousand drums could not have made as much noise as that bolt of lightning; it was positively deafening. The sea turned ...”

“... inventory of population, livestock, crops and landholdings was conducted by Cromwell’s adviser William Petty after the conquest of Ireland, the better to plunder the country’s natural resources and divide the spoils among the conquerors. Cadastral surveys were instituted as a normal administrative routine by the British in India long before they came to ...”

“... the GOP’s stated long-term national strategy. His apparent tolerance for and sometime stoking of white nationalists (the going euphemism for neo-Nazis) and his abandonment of ethnic dog whistles in favour of blatantly racist rhetoric have painted the GOP into a corner as the party of the resentful and ageing portion of a ...”

“... poets to Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley House; Vienna, where Auden bore out his own ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”

“... in New York City. ‘It was wonderful, and revelatory as it always is,’ he told his friend Tony White. ‘I learn more about people and myself in NY than anywhere else. I got offered a job in a tough-queer 3rd Avenue bar the day before I left, and if I hadn’t been under contract to Berkeley I’d have accepted it’ (he’d been given a visiting ...”

“... reclining figures in the foreground with its light blues and greys and dabs and dashes of creamy white, enlivened by touches of pink and vermilion, is rhymed with the pale buildings of the distant city, rather as the buff pink of the soil repeats the colour of the sky. In his great portraits of the 1790s Goya contrasts such delicate harmonies with a black ...”

“... of the press) proclaiming ‘Get your racist education at Stanford.’ The acronym DWEM (dead white European male) and the neologism ‘freshpeople’ were giggled over at dinner parties. Jesse Jackson visited the campus and was greeted by five hundred students chanting ‘Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Western Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it ...”